We f***** up in Ohio," she admitted. "In Ohio, they are obsessed and Hillary is going to town on it, because she knows Ohio's the only place they can win.

"She is a monster, too – that is off the record – she is stooping to anything," Ms Power said, hastily trying to withdraw her remark.

Power is a Harvard Law grad.

Ms Power was head-hunted by Barack Obama to become his foreign-policy adviser in 2005 and combines this role with her job as a Time magazine columnist and professor of practice of global leadership and public policy at Harvard.

He defended David Axelrod when he said Hillary was responsible for Benazir Bhutto's assassination. "Well, he didn't say she was directly responsible." There is no chance of seeing anything more than an apology from this, and maybe not even that. Obama knows this sort of thing fires up the base.

I was hoping you'd pick up on that post with this link. What is going on here! If this was the other way around, you know HRC would have to fire this person, as she's had to in the past--even if they were volunteers.

Do you think it would be a good strategy for her to bring this up to illustrate the double standard OR/ would she be accused of whining?

three losses (which they maintained are not really losses) and they are already acting this way? I say that it means that the longer the primary campaign goes, the better for Hillary. She can can continue campaigning just like she did in Ohio and Texas and watch Obama's campaign self-destruct. I think that all these gaffes only prove the 'experience factor."

but more like an inexperienced operative lacking the skills to manipulate the press (Goolsbee comes to mind). It is quite obvious from the last three days of watching Obama, the Ax and now Powers, that the campaign strategy is not to reply substantively to Clinton's attacks but to re-rollout the October strategy of a.) claim that Hillary will stoop too anything and is evil and b.) throw out strawmen arguments,ie, tax returns.
Earlier today, Tweety had a whole segment detailing a call inside the Clinton campaign where people said the F word. I wonder if he will devote as much time to Powers use of the word in her interview.
Also I await the condemnation of the Kos crowd of Powers for advancing arguments that will likely be used by McCain in the general election. I can see the ad now: "Hillary is a monster! Obama's people said she was. Hide your children."

"I was shocked when I learned Iowa and Mississippi have never elected a woman governor, senator or member of Congress," Clinton told the Des Moines Register in October. "There has got to be something at work here. How can Iowa be ranked with Mississippi? That's not the quality. That's not the communitarianism, that's not the openness I see in Iowa.'"

I think that having lives in Arkansas, Clinton knows exactly what she is talking about. When I heard the quote, I was shocked about Iowa, too. MIss knows what its problems are--especially the women who live there. If Obama wants to spin it, let him have at it. When the shoe is on the other foot, and Obama is taking folks to task, it's speaking truth to power. When Clinton does it, it's...wrong?

...She's a foreign policy aide? Not good. If they are winning like they say they are, I've no idea why she was freaked out enough to make these kind of comments. I'm not inclined to feel too good about putting people who crack this much under pressure in any positions of responsibility.

these folks act like a bunch of petulant militant babies name calling, really what would they seriously do in a general election they can't handle his lose of 3 States now, they dont appear to understand they are not entitled to the nomination, it has to be won. Offensive.

that only a woman can really cut another woman off at the knees like this.

Christ. So despicable. And I really hope she was drinking when she said all of this. She wants to be the foreign policy advisor to the President of the United States and she thinks that throwing in "this is off the record" in the middle of a slur against a major political figure while she is in a foreign country is enough?

Anyway I think this comment really speaks to the anger in the Obama campaign regarding some of the overt tactics employed by the Clinton campaign in the past week or so.

It is very clear that the Obama campaign has taken the attacks of the past week very personally. And while I'm sure most of the Hillary supporters here think those attacks are no big deal they are to the Obama team.

These weren't poor choice of words smears or gaffes like Bill South Carolina gaffe or Obama's periodically blurt. These were overt and intentional attempts at smearing Obama and his campaign.

It was a poor choice of words. And Ms. Power should apologize for it. It is NOT the same as referencing Obama's teenage drug use. It is a meaningless comment as I'm pretty sure that the vast majority of us know that Hillary is, in fact, NOT a monster.

but there is nothing to substantiate that there was editing with the intent of making Obama appear blacker. This is not a road we should be going down as charges of racist motivation are very serious and should be backed up by significant evidence. There have been many explanations that provide how this can happen during the editing process without any motivation of other purposes.

Whether or not we think Hillary Clinton is a monster is beside the point. Last week we were hearing that the Obama camp could take anything that was thrown their way, that the Republicans couldn't rattle them. Now we are hearing stuff like this.

But do you really think that it hasn't hurt Bill Clinton to his soul to be called a racist? You think it doesn't sting Hillary even just a little bit to be accused of darkening a photograph to make Obama look blacker? Maybe you think all these things are true so you might not give them the benefit of thinking they have feelings. But in order to receive sympathy, sometimes you have to send out a little empathy. Just my opinion.

"it's hard to make fun of people when you see them as human beings with feelings."

I dunno, guys, this is coming from the TOP--a key advisor. It's getting harder and harder for me to believe that the misogynistic, hateful crap that has overtaken some left blogs is not condoned by the Obama campaign. What we are getting a glimpse into with these words is how top officials with the campaign feel about Clinton.

I guess we will find out tomorrow how high up it goes, because if Obama does not strongly denounce what this woman said and distance himself from her nasty words, then we will know the cut of the man.

and noticing that Obama said it to his lap, couldn't lift his eyes. Clinton looked squarely at him, at the interviewer, and at the camera.
I just have to figure, too, that this "tone" of the Obama campaign is coming from the top. But I thought it was only within our borders. Good lord, this is how his people talk to the international press, at a time when we need to restore our status in the world? Obama's staff has gone beyond amateur hour. This now is getting downright dangerous.

one of the reasons we get to this stage of hurling insults at each other is the conviction that the other side's smears are far, far, far worse. I'm sure Clinton's people are just as convinced that Obama has run a scummy campaign.

You either reduce tensions or you escalate them. That's how the world works.

What bothers me about the Obama folks is that they seem to think that their candidate is pure as the driven snow, and that Hillary is the incarnation of evil. A lot of us watching this from the beginning (I was for Edwards before I turned to Hillary) gave up on Obama because he appeared to stop at nothing, including the possibility of splitting the party --to turn black voters against two people who had always been their friends. He and his surrogates did this by twisting the Clintons' words just like the Rethugs did to Gore and Kerry.

I was also turned off by Michelle Obama's petulance in stating that she didn't know whether or not she would vote for Hillary in the GE if she won. Now everyone is jumping on that bandwagon, petulantly stating that they'll sit out the election if Hillary leads the ticket. I just want to say to the Obama people that this kind of animosity was started by them, but at this point it runs both ways. When you say nothing when your followers use misogynist insults to attack the other candidate or bullying language and threatening behavior in caucuses and online, then you are inviting the same in response. You aren't the only ones who think the other side is acting badly, believe me.

The whole Obama campaign seems to be run by people who are either really young or haven't paid any attention to any other political race ever. If they think that Hillary's 3:00 am ad was bad, they should have experienced the ad Howard Dean's opponents threw at him to wrest Iowa away from him in 2004 or, better yet, be the target of the "Dean Scream" hysteria by the MSM, conjured up for the sole purpose of planting a stake into his populist candidacy. If that happens, you have grounds for complaint. But there is nothing Hillary has done that Obama hasn't done worse, in my opinion. Just remember there are two sides to every question.

i think it says a lot about the campaign's ideas are. and there is no excuse. the hillary campaign has every right to be angry about this about the slurs by the media. which by the way obama never spoke about that i saw.

Obama is no Ken Star. When was the last time he brought up Monica????? HOW is he like Ken Star? Cuz he asked about her tax returns. GIVE ME A BREAK. And no, Hillary is not a monster, but that doesn't make Ken Star ok.

Any points to make about issues of restoring our status with the world, via staff interviews with the European press? Or even the Canadian press?
Character is an issue in this campaign, according to Obama. How ought he handle a Rovian attack on the character of the other Dem candidate? (For that matter, would this be acceptable if said about McCain? Or is Obama only uniting with Republicans?)

Ken Star may have started with this, but believe me, this is not where he ended, and frankly it was his job to go after whitewater, I don't think that is why everyone has a problem with him. The problem is, he used Whitewater as an excuse to go after Bill about Monica.

Well, since we are regularly told to support Obama based on his superior judgment, I think it's a good time to question the sort of judgment he's used in hiring his staff.

Let's see, so far we've got Goolsbee, an economics adviser who decided to dabble in foreign relations and then lie about it. Then Susan Rice admits on TV that her candidate is not qualified to answer an emergency phone call as president. And now this one. He is making the parallels to W. just way, way too easy. If this is what his campaign looks like, how many "Heckuva Job Brownie's" do you think will fill his cabinet?

Aside from the monster comment, the other disturbing aspect of her statement seems to be her dismissal of Ohio as "the only place they can win". Uh, do they not get the importance of Ohio in terms of winning the presidency? I know you just got your hats handed to you there, but it might not be a good idea to blow them off.

with apologies to all of you nice people closer to the coast. Interesting how Obama, a Westerner, sounds so Eastern and elitist, actually -- I think it helped Clinton in Ohio that she still just sounds so Midwestern middle-class. As she says, y'know?

that Hillary has demeaned them by comparing the lack of women in office in Iowa to their own record of women officials. Hillary's comments there are more nuanced, but she was calling them out for the lack of political women in both states. That doesn't sound like MS was demeaned as much as chastised.

I've seen 3 of his aides taken to task on here, and they all have links to a print source. Both camps are held to account for any statement coming out of them.

Like I said, I personally would like to see her repeat the statement when she's there the next couple of days. I appreciate it when a person in power calls people to task for their shortcomings, especially in a case like MS. Just for the record, I would like to see Obama acknowledge that Sen. Clinton did have a valid point, in that MS has not progressed at the rate of the rest of the country. MS didn't even ratify the 13th amendment until 1995. They deserve to be preached to by both Clinton and Obama, imo.

I thought we were seeing the dawn of a new political figure in Obama? It's sad that because his campaign didn't win Ohio that they have to resort to name-calling and sling angry words at HRC. HRC is right...as Ohio goes so goes the nation. BTW, I am going to start making donations to Talk Left every time I donate to HRC. FINALLY I have found a blog that isn't Barak-centric!

Obama is creating a "new kind of politics".
He's taking politics to a new low.
He's established that it is possible to denigrate your opponent's judgment for months and get away with it, without getting called out for running a negative campaign. And that your campaign can call your opponent despicable names without repercussion.

if Mabus is truly "tired of people putting us down," then maybe he could encourage his state to be on the right side of progress, instead of being on the wrong side of every issue of equality since the Civil War.

i made years ago: you can send an idiot to harvard, but you'll end up with an idiot holding a harvard degree. i do blame harvard, and all other ivy league schools. when your admissions are based solely on academics, with no value given for "street smarts", this is what you produce. as well, i suspect ms. power has zero actual real world experience, in anything. not the kind of person you want advising you on, um, uh, real world issues.

but hey, that's just me, i'm funny that way.

flyerhawk, i've read your posts and refrained from comment. no longer. please substantiate your allegations of "attacks" by the clinton campaign. specifically, the implication that said "attacks" were baseless. provide links to unrelated third party sources.
otherwise, shut up.

Powers "was haunted by her experience during the Bosnia war in the early 1990s, when, stringing for the Washington Post, she reported on the Serb attack on Srebrenica before the massacre of Bosnian Muslims there, but failed to get a story in the paper." (Wash. Monthly, last year) She went on to write an incredible book about genocide.

that just because you can dazzle the people with great rhetoric you are ready for primetime, i.e., running for the leader of the free world. Barak's campaign spokesperson(s) may want to take a cue from their candidate before they too have to refer to their actions and comments as "boneheaded".

I'd also like to point out that not only did he bring up judgment -- he's basing his entire campaign on it. He doesn't have experience, but boy does he have judgment. Just as the Obama campaign spends their time questioning Clinton's experience, so too can the Clinton campaign question his judgment. If he wants to use his judgment against the war as a reason to vote for him, than it is perfectly legitimate to question that judgement in all sorts of other areas.

And I suppose a person's judgment is part of their overall character -- but if he didn't want people to dissect it, then he shouldn't have built a campaign on it.

In a 2002 interview at Berkeley[4] , that has been widely criticized [5], Power proposed that instead of encouraging negotiations between Israelis and Arabs, the United States should spend "billions of dollars" to send a " meaningful military" force to effect the "imposition of a solution" and create "the new state of Palestine" beside Israel. [6] In March 2008, Power described her previous opinion as "weird." [7] LINK

as affiliate with the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, Samantha Power must know that de-humanization is a key step in the escalation of political difference to physical violence. Her comment is truly reprehensible.

Power made no "mistake" in the typical sense of the word. A mistake often implies misunderstanding or ignorance. In this case, it is not possible to defend Power on these grounds. She knows, as an academic and journalist, that it is the printed and spoken word that affects de-humanization of opponents in political struggles. She knew exactly what that word meant, above and beyond its normal use, in a political competition.

That Power took the additional step to tell this reporter, "off the record," only implicates her further in knowingly engaging in this kind of dehumanizing attack. Did Power say this to a journalist in hopes of influencing the tenor of his article? Whether she wanted it on the record or not, she wanted the power of her word to shape the content and tone of the article.

They have an section at the end of the article. Ground rules are set up in advance of the interview. There are no take backs. Ms. Powers shouldn't have run her mouth off. She wasn't joshing around with a member of the docile US press corps.

if it was tours. If it was not, how would you know to quewstioin the deleteiojn?

But this does give me ANOTHER opportunity to explain something - this is Jeralyn's blog.. She let's me write hre. We demand civility and respect for ourselves, for the candidates and for fellow commenters.

Failure to adhere to that will result in comment deletions, suspensions and if necessary, bannings.

This blog is not a democracy nor a pure free speech zone.

We welcome disagreement but not insults and incivility.

Our judgment on these issues is the final one. Once we decide to delete, the issue is closed.

"I think that since we now know Sen. (John) McCain will be the nominee for the Republican Party, national security will be front and center in this election. We all know that. And I think it's imperative that each of us be able to demonstrate we can cross the commander-in-chief threshold," the New York senator told reporters crowded into an infant's bedroom-sized hotel conference room in Washington.

"I believe that I've done that. Certainl

Leaving aside the extremely dubious notion that Hillary or McCain have somehow demonstrated anything close to that, why does she continue to praise John McCain over Barack Obama?

I am not a one of those people that gets up in arms every time a candidate says something mean about my candidate.

As a matter of fact the only comments I have criticized are her praising of McCain over Obama which I condemn, not because it hurts Obama per se, but because it hurts the Democratic Party. If Obama were to pick Hillary for VP, or vice versa, how does she explain away these comments?

As for things the Obama campaign has done that I don't care much for. I don't like some of their ads and I specifically objected on this site to their NAFTA mailers which I felt were misleading.

You got Bob Baurer crashing campaign press conferences.
You got "Hope" Axlerod talking about how after all of his phony hope rhetoric, he's going to begin a scorched Earth smear campaign.
You got Obama's press guy Plauff(?) loosing his mind in interviews.
Now this Samantha Powers is vilifying Obama's opponent.

OBama's campaign is in full-on freakout mode.
Their glass jaw has been exposed.
All they are good at is caucusing and fooling gullible people.
There won't be any caucuses come November for a bunch of fanatics to be camped out at all day long.

Hillary wins where Democrats win. You can't even name 5 states that Obama has won that has ever gone in the Dem column come presidential election time, and if you think Obama will win these piddling caucus states come November, I'm giving away a free bottle of "male enhancers" to the first 100 callers.

Your suggested outcome may be possible, even probable -- but it is by no means a given. There are a number of scenarios that could turn your prediction on it's head. As a political junkie, I'm sure you've come across at least some of the alternative outcomes to this primary season.

is patently wrong. You must be new or something...(no biggie, I'm fairly new here too), but if you page back to one of BTD's posts about NAFTAgate, you'll be able to read the memo and the discussion about it.

Still, it's likely the result of inexperience. You can say whatever you want behind closed doors, but in her position, you have to know how to deal with the press. O/T, last year she used the phrase "drank the Kool-Aid" in referring to her meeting wtih Sen. Obama and becoming an advisor to him. Kind of funny that even Obama supporters toss that phrase around.

stupid thing to say. I don't think Power is an official spokesperson or anything, she's a policy advisor, right? I don't think folks like that really have much business talking to the press anyway unless their giving a briefing for the campaign.

It wasn't a good thing to say, it wasn't nice, and it wasn't smart politics. But when I say it's not so bad I mean it's not misogynistic, it does convey false information, it's not crude. It's just an extremely poorly thought out way of expressing frustration and dislike.

While I think that Samantha Power made a dumb mistake, probably because she thought that her comment wouldn't get picked up off in cheery Scotland, I do not want to see her leave the campaign. She should apologize. End of story.

I think she is exactly the kind of people that need to be on a President's staff. This a woman who has devoted her life to human rights and coming up with sound plans to solve real world crises.

I find it sad that so many people here are willing to crucify her because she isn't a savvy inside the beltway politician. Heck one poster her even implied she was a misogynist, which is downright shocking.

Oy. People need to seriously chill about this primary, on all sides. I'm trying to believe that this lengthy contest will not damage our chances in the fall, but it's hard for me to look at it that way. Regardless of who ultimately prevails, the longer this goes on, the higher the emotions and the less time there is for the supporters of the losing candidate to step back, get over their disappointment and anger, and put things in perspective.

The monster comment was childish, petulant, and definitely amateurish. I don't see it as a "negative attack" in the political sense -- it doesn't prompt some damaging media debate about whether Hillary is really a monster. It damages no one except the speaker and the principal (in this case Obama). I kind of feel sorry for Obama on this one because it's just cringe inducing and, whatever you think of him, he clearly prides himself on trying to keep his own emotions in check and not being a hothead. And if we're being honest, this incident is pure gold for the Clinton camp.

What's more interesting about this is that it's a window into the fact that the high emotions we see in various blog posts (on both sides) exist within the campaigns as well. I have no doubt this is currently the case within both the Obama and Clinton campaigns.

Should he fire Powers? I don't know. That would be the politically easy and expedient thing to do. But by all accounts she's a very astute foreign policy wonk (though obviously not a diplomat!). Firing her is the easy thing to do. I think I'd be more impressed if Obama gives her a public dressing down but doesn't fire her. That would be the less "politics as usual" outcome. We'll see.

meaning that these kind of mistakes eventually start piling up. Makes you wonder if they are really up to do the job. It also really makes it hard for me to vote for him if he ends up being the nominee.